#trees of distinction

[panoramicireland]

Swans in Dublin's Grand Canal at Portobello. The area is undergoing a redevelopment with the building of a hotel on the site of the buildings behind the tree here.

Swans are not always on this stretch of water, but are more often than not.

[bonefall]

If you’ve already answered this then no worries, but what would the typical clan cat lifespan be then (assuming they don’t die prematurely from injury/illness). Just curious as to how many generations have passed since the clan’s founding in the 80 or so years.

Clan cat lifespans can be pretty variable! They're considered senior warriors at 5, but if all works out their lifespan is often 16 years. Kittens usually enter the picture for a parent who is 2 to 8 years old, but they COULD have them anywhere between 1 to 15.

Clan cats play less attention to raw age than to EXPERIENCE, though. It is socially discouraged for a fresh warrior to become a parent, and you are NOT an adult until you're out of apprenticeship. They see age like this;

Child: Less than 6 full moons SEEN. If a kitten's eyes were not opened when the first moon of their life passed over them, that is not a month they were alive.

Adolescent: The amount of time you are an apprentice. Flamepaw was considered a child while his sister was an adult.

Young Adult: The first full year out of apprenticeship, when you've handled a full year on your own. A warrior is only eligible for an apprentice after this length of time, so by extension a cat COULD be a mentor around age 2 (BUT that's considered young. 3 is a better bet.)

Adulthood is even more variable, because you're usually not considered "aged" until you've had an apprentice or a litter and you're around 5 years old. Without either of those things, you often won't be considered a "senior warrior" until you're as old as 8.

So to answer your question directly, you can comfortably estimate a new crop of warriors about every 5 years, and full population turnover every 15. Between the numbers, 8 is a good estimation of how long it takes for a generation to pass

(Though I'm more partial to historic events and time periods than crunching numbers like that)

Elders can hang on for a LOOONG time though-- One-eye over in ThunderClan was a personal friend of Pinestar and witnessed the Crusades before passing away at the tender age of 20-something.

[serpentface]

Do psychotropic drugs and/or ritual play a role in any of the blightseed cultures? A pretty broad question, lol

Yeah that’s a very broad question, the answer is about as much as it tends to play roles in real history. Alcohol is pretty ubiquitous (outside of cultures that abstain from intoxicants) and used for a variety of purposes, opioids are commonly used in some parts for pain relief or recreational purposes, stimulants (usually in mild, natural forms) are used to provide extra energy, and hallucinogens are most commonly used as part of a larger religious framework (rather than for recreational purposes). Any more elaborate answer kinda has to be case by case in a certain culture or part of the setting.

I'll just take this as an opportunity to talk about the one established sect that pretty much REVOLVES around psychoactive use. This is the Scholarly Order of the Root, which is a sort of mystery religion + elite community of scholars who currently occupy the Ur-Tree and its forest in the far southern Lowlands (southeast of Imperial Wardin, on the same land mass).

The Ur-Tree is the obligatory Huge Fucking Fantasy Tree (and its surrounding forest). It’s a mass of vegetation about a mile tall and almost as old as Plant Life Itself, its upper branches are primeval plants, which become more modern the nearer they get to the ground (and each 'level' holds tiny ecosystems, some containing descendants of LONG-extinct arthropods/other small animals). Its lowest branches and the surrounding forest are contemporary plant life, and all is connected and protected by an incomparably MASSIVE fungal mycelium network (which is itself a living god).

A lot of the Scholars' more secretive practices revolve around experimentation with substance use with the goal of expanding the Mind and transcending the body to fully connect to the Dreamlands, and they have a supply chain of traders and mercenaries called Rootrunners who traffic substances into the Lowlands. Most of their psychoactive use is in a very intentional capacity and not just like, for fun, but a LOT of them are just straight up addicted to cocaine (in the form of alchemically refined bruljenum, which is used for practical purposes of its stimulant effect during long hours of work).

All known psychoactives are desirable for experimentation (particularly hallucinogens), with each having properties that either allow expansion of the Mind, transcendence of the body, or outright divine communion. Their effects are logged in great detail and interpreted to form the basis of the Scholars' understanding of the natural world and reality itself.

The most important substance is Ur-Root, which is root matter from subterranean levels of the Ur-Tree that have both their own intrinsic psychoactive substances and a very, very high concentration of living god mycelium. The tree root contains DMT and the mycelium has its own wholly unique effects (being an actual living god). They alchemically refine it into a purer, more potent form, and use it to expand beyond the body and directly commune with the Giants, a group of entities they have identified as the only true gods.

An Ur-Root trip starts off with minor visual distortion, which turns into shifting fractals that slowly obscure the vision. Eventually the senses are entirely taken over by a 'tunnel' of rapidly shifting fractals and geometries. In a complete trip, the experiencer gets a sense that they have been pushed through a membrane and entered another realm, finding themselves in a distinct experiential Space.

At this point they may encounter entities which communicate to them in a language impossible to describe but wholly understood. These beings are understood to be the Giants, or at least aspects of the Giants that mortals are capable of comprehending (they often take familiar tutelary forms of the Mantis or the Snake, or appear resembling the same type of sophont that the experiencer is, all composed of ever-shifting geometries). The experiencer often feels a sense of unconditional and endless love from these beings, though the Giants may be more hostile and may appear in the form of the Trickster (usually a cultural figure regarded as malicious, be it an animal or otherwise) in a bad trip.

(^Up until this point, this has mostly just been a DMT 'breakthrough' experience ft. 'machine elves' and the like).

They are then removed from this space and returned to something that feels like the real world, but is nearly unrecognizable. They have a sense of rapidly moving through time, and will usually see 'the spires' towards the beginning, which just so happen to look like this:

(source + some context via Implication- the spires are exactly what this art is depicting)

The experiencer continues to move across an unfathomable amount of time, occasionally 'seeing' other such flashes of unfamiliar landscapes and creatures, and yet also being devoid of all their senses, the 'seeing' is pure, unfiltered experience. There is a sense of interconnectedness with all life, and that one has become the forest (or even Life) itself. The sense of time is wildly distorted, the trip lasts only about 5 minutes but feels like an eternity and is understood as literal hundreds of millions of years.

The experiencer has usually lost any remaining sense of Self and individual consciousness during this phase (in which case this time distortion is usually a neutral or even peaceful experience), but some retain a fraction of their identity, and find themselves trapped and conscious while experiencing what feels like eternity (which can be LIFE-CHANGINGLY distressing, even after the fact).

(^This latter part of the trip is the effects of the Ur-Tree fungus).

The trip ends with a sense of rushing through the ground and back up into one's body, at which point they will abruptly return to their senses and consciousness. The details are then immediately retrieved via interview and recorded in immense detail. The whole experience is understood as having been full comprehension of the Dreamlands, communion with the Giants, and then a tour through the act of creation.

This is done as part of the initiatory practice into the inner mystery-religion of the scholars, and as needed for study by high scholar-priests. It is not taken lightly, both as it is absolute communion with the gods and reality, and in that it can be a very, very difficult experience. People who have gone through this often walk away with a permanently shifted perspective, often in a positive and/or comforting way- a sense of interconnectedness with all life, a peace with the concept of death, seeing less of a point in individual ego and the concept of Self, and comfort in the sense of divine love they (may have) experienced. This heavily influences the philosophy of the Scholars and has had effects by proxy in the religious worldviews of the region.

Details of this experience are closely guarded, and initiates are given absolutely no prior knowledge and expectations for their trip. This is seen as a necessity- their naivety will allow for a true, unfiltered experience, and can be used to gauge whether they should or should not be accepted. Those that have a distinctly bad trip upon initiation may be assumed to have been 'rejected' by the giants and thus denied full priesthood, though this largely depends on How they interpret their distressing trip- those who identify this as a test and harsh lesson in a journey to enlightenment may be accepted (as this is how fully initiated scholar-priests interpret and handle their bad trips).

This inner priesthood is only a small fraction of the Scholarly Order, and its greater function is as a hub of education and repository of knowledge, and Scholar-trained doctors can provide some of the best medical care available in the setting ('best medical care in this setting' only means so much but it's pretty solid, relatively speaking). Only a chosen few Scholars ever get to commune with the Ur-Root, and most of the divine secrets revealed in the process are kept hidden (though they indirectly influence the politics and worldview of the entire order).

[crow-quet]

been seeing these little design challenges on twitter re: warrior cats so i decided to try my hand at it with the tigerclones !!! :3

[fight-nights-at-freddys]

i think its funny that antis can't comprehend the fact that my therapist is okay with me shipping problematic things and that she also dislikes antis.

[maculategiraffe]

the same roofers are here today and boyfriend just whispered to me "should we walk out there and go" (jovially) "'SOMEbody's got a case of the GIGGLES'"

[totallyseiso]

Gonna reinstall warband. Vanilla bannerlord is a far better game than vanilla warband, but that sengoku mod for warband is so good and the bannerlord version doesn't have a release date yet

[neunhofferart]

Storyboard samples from Seasons 5-8 of The Croods: Family Tree! I got to board so many fun sequences on this show... it was really difficult to squeeze a reel into just 2 minutes ToT

[keeps-ache]

which of these are better? :>

[housewifebuck]

Ok so if I’m gonna write this fic I need someone to help me with the Diaz family lore

[panoramicireland]

Leafy autumn with leaf drop along the Grand Canal in Dublin.

It's one of my favourite parts of Dublin, in all a very photogenic city.

[pepprs]

acnl is a superior game to acnh in almost every way except the graphics. it’s actually making me mad

[armenelols]

I am at a coffeeshop studying organic chemistry and some two primary school kids with their math tutor sat down very close to me and now I can't focus because all I hear is the tutor explaining math. Help

[gideonisms]

would ya say griddlehark typifies the adhd4autism pairing or is that an oversimplification or both? i love them

Quite possibly! I'm not an expert on the adhd/autism ship parameters. like what score on the RAADS test does a character have to have before it counts? how do the social and/or medical models of disability interact with a system where no one has our current psychiatric knowledge? Perhaps the most horrifying though tangential question this brings up: did john just make all his autistic friends necromancers?

There's a lot to consider here. If you mean do they have an adhd/autism aura? the answer is obviously yes

[quohotos]

Have you heard about Sagan 4? (It may be in need of an owl analogue...an anowlogue...)

WOW there is a lot of lore. I did the best I could to make this anowlogue fit in with the other similar fauna on the planet, but still with features that would make it clearly Owl.

[ammonitetestpatterns]

released on bi-joopiter in 1994.